Auburn’s Kingmaker Isn’t Sharing in the Moment

PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — With the Auburn football job open in December 1992, Mike Lude, then the university’s athletic director, interviewed a stellar group of candidates: North Carolina’s Mack Brown, Southern California’s Larry Smith and West Virginia’s Don Nehlen.

But Lude and the hiring committee were most impressed by a long-shot candidate, Terry Bowden, the little-known coach at Samford in Birmingham, Ala.

Years later, Lude found out why Bowden, who ultimately won the job, was so prepared for the interview. Bowden told him that the Auburn superbooster Bobby Lowder, who had sat in on other candidates’ interviews, had prepped Bowden in his hotel room the night before his meeting with Auburn officials.

That is a prime example of the influence, mystery and ambition of Lowder, a member of Auburn’s board of trustees who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the athletic department. A quiet man who rarely speaks to reporters, Lowder has remained in the shadows of Auburn University and its football program for decades while fans, the news media and the faculty speculate over how much power he really has.

“I would describe him as a person who is very quiet, very much behind the scenes, yet very much involved,” Lude said in a telephone interview. “My wife one time said, ‘You know, Mike, Bobby Lowder really acts like the Auburn Tigers are his professional football franchise.’ ”

If No. 1 Auburn defeats No. 2 Oregon on Monday night for its first national football championship since 1957, it should be a crowning moment for Lowder. But some say his power has dwindled since his actions in 2003 helped land Auburn on academic probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, a regional accreditation agency.

“In a strange way, there’s enormous irony to the fact that if this had all happened five years ago, it would have been his ultimate triumph,” said Wayne Flynt, a history professor emeritus at Auburn and noted Alabama historian. “This is the final morsel of a very overindulgent banquet. I just don’t know how much you enjoy it anymore.”

Lowder, 68, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Since being appointed to Auburn’s board by Gov. George Wallace in 1983, Lowder has exerted undeniable influence. In 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, he stepped down as the chairman and chief executive of Colonial BancGroup in 2009 after personally losing $160 million, according to reports. Prominent Auburn alumni, including the former football coach Pat Dye and the Alabama gambling magnate Milton E. McGregor, lost millions, too. McGregor, who was indicted last year by a federal grand jury on charges of public corruption, lost at least $19 million in Colonial stock.

Since the bank’s implosion, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission have sifted through Florida real estate deals involving Colonial, and a shareholder lawsuit has accused the bank of misleading investors into believing Colonial could secure money through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

“For Lowder, this all has to be bittersweet,” Flynt said by telephone. “Perhaps more than anything else in his life he wants Auburn to win the national championship. Now he’s been marginalized.”

A decade ago, Lowder’s influence over Auburn was silent but immutable. The university scuttled its economics program, a department dear to one of Lowder’s critics on the board of trustees. After the student newspaper began crusading against Lowder’s influence, the university folded the journalism department into its communications program. When the trustees fired the university’s president, William Muse, in 2001, faculty members and students blamed Lowder.

Muse, who said he no longer had contact with Lowder, tiptoed around the subject of what a national title would mean.

“Bobby has been very close to everything that has happened there, particularly with the football program,” Muse said in a telephone interview. “There’s got to be a feeling of ownership, in a sense of identity with the program.”

Auburn, a state-financed university, has churned through presidents, athletic directors and football coaches during Lowder’s time on the board, yet he has remained a constant. To try to weaken his influence over Auburn, alumni lobbied the Alabama Legislature to change the process for trustee appointments. But Lowder’s connections in Montgomery, the state capital, particularly with Don Siegelman when he was governor and with a few key state senators, kept the alumni at bay.

Lowder’s passion for football has sometimes been detrimental to the university. In 2003, William Walker and David Housel, who were then Auburn’s president and athletic director, flew to Kentucky on Lowder’s private plane to court Louisville’s Bobby Petrino to replace Tommy Tuberville as Auburn’s football coach. The discovery of the secret midseason mission erupted into a scandal Alabamians still refer to as Jetgate.

Lowder’s power has waned since the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools threatened to strip Auburn of its accreditation, citing the meddlesome trustees and their interlocking ties to Lowder as a reason for probation.

Photo

Auburn, a state-financed university, has churned through presidents, athletic directors and football coaches during Lowder’s time on the board, yet he has remained a constant.Credit
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Lowder’s efforts to oust Tuberville as coach failed, though Tuberville was fired after the 2008 season and replaced by Gene Chizik, his former defensive coordinator.

“In my two years there, Mr. Lowder has done some great things for Auburn, but there hasn’t been that much contact,” Chizik said. “I’m very appreciative of all he’s done for Auburn University. Just don’t see him much. He is busy with a lot of things going on in the business world.”

Lude said he alienated Lowder early in his tenure as athletic director. He recalled that Lowder sent a messenger to his office saying: “Mr. Lowder can help you be very successful here. He would like you to touch base with him two or three times a week.” Lude said that he declined to go behind the back of Muse, the university president, and that Lowder was cold to him from then on.

“One of the secretaries in the president’s office told me, ‘Mike, every time you and Mr. Muse are together, or when you’re in his office, there’s a telephone call to Montgomery that the two of you are talking,’ ” Lude recalled.

Lowder was based in Montgomery at the time.

Athletic Director Jay Jacobs, who has avoided the news media in the week before the championship game, did not return a call seeking comment. The Auburn assistant coach Trooper Taylor said he only knew Lowder’s name.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2011, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Auburn’s Kingmaker Isn’t Sharing in the Moment. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe